Against The Middle

by Caleb Wachter

  “Two strikes detected on Torpedo #1,” Hephaestion reported hesitantly before continuing, “#1 is still on-target, Captain, and its engines appear to have restarted.”

  Middleton checked the torpedo’s new time to intercept and quickly said, “No change to fire control, Mr. Toto. Coordinate the strikes with the first torpedo.”

  “Yes sir,” Toto acknowledged, and the seconds continued to tick away on the clock.

  With five seconds remaining, the first torpedo’s icon flared and disappeared, causing Middleton’s heart to quite literally stop beating in his chest. It was too late to change fire control now; the missiles would not accept such late changes since their firing process had already begun.

  “Three…two…one,” Toto roared before slamming his finger down on the button controlling the Starfires, “firing!!”

  Forty eight Starfire missiles stabbed their fusion-powered lasers into the forward shields of the Vae Victus, and the Pride’s forward battery added its own weight to the deadly barrage as the battleship closed to extreme short range with Middleton’s aged cruiser.

  The Vae Victus’ icon flared, indicating the laser strikes had impacted on her shields—and then an explosion unlike anything Middleton had seen with his own two eyes filled the visual pickup tracking the Rim Fleet Flagship with a blinding, white light just as the Commodore’s ship banked hard to port.

  The icon of the Vae Victus disappeared, and Middleton allowed his emotions to take over as he leapt from his chair and made a primal sound of victory which was unlike anything he had ever expected to hear produced by his throat. It was the kind of thing he had come to expect from his Sundered Tactical Officer, but he didn’t care how it might have looked to the crew; he had just taken a shot that had been weeks in the making, and it had been a bull’s eye!

  The visual feed was down due to the explosion apparently having overpowered its filters, but Hephaestion had already begun to run back the recording so they could see the impact on slow motion.

  In just a few seconds, the young Tracto-an had found the moment of impact and Middleton exultation was reduced several notches. He could plainly see during the replay that the starboard hull of the Vae Victus had taken the explosion directly, but the Commodore had slewed and tilted his ship in such a way that the awesome power of the Liberator torpedo’s Nova warhead—which had been shaped by the weapon’s excessively thick armor into a forward-facing, funnel-shaped blast—had destroyed that hull but left the port section almost completely unaffected.

  The Commodore had known what he was up against and he had calmly, clinically, and correctly turned his vessel in the precise fashion he had done, saving half of his crew in the process and keeping what now remained of his ruined Flagship in play.

  “Look alive—“ Middleton began, only to be cut off by a massive explosion from the stern of his ship which caused the deck to lurch violently.

  He was thrown from his chair’s dais, and the next thing he knew he was groggily dragging himself up to a kneeling position beside the Comm. station with an intense ringing in one ear, and absolutely nothing in the other.

  He tried to call for a report, but no words came from his lips. He reached up to his throat, checking stupidly to see if his neck had been grievously wounded and his hand came back with blood on it, but not an alarming amount. He forcibly cleared his throat and hoarsely barked, “Report!”

  Nearby, he saw Hephaestion had taken a blow to the head as well but he was back in front of his station.

  “Engine three is gone, Captain,” the young Tracto-an reported, and Middleton looked for Toto and could not find him at first. But then he looked to the helm and saw the uplift was standing over the helm station. The chair in which he should have been sitting was lying fifteen feet away, apparently having been torn from its moorings by the explosion.

  But when Middleton saw that the other helmsman’s body was lying motionless on the opposite side of the helm from the chair, he realized that the Sundered must have torn the chair off with his herculean strength and taken control of the helm himself. There was no way the uplift would have fit into the chair, so Middleton was grateful rather than upset that his Tactical Officer had done as he had—as well as mildly alarmed by the fact that he had never considered this particular eventuality.

  Moving to the Tactical station, Middleton saw that most of the systems appeared to be operational. “Report, Helm,” he barked, his jaw seizing up painfully as he spoke. He reached up and felt that it was clearly broken on the left side, so he forced it back into something like its normal position before clenching his teeth and reminding himself not to move his jaw if he felt the need to speak.

  “Engines one two down,” Toto replied gruffly. “Engine three up, but ship is slow…difficult to align.”

  “Do your best,” Middleton said through clenched teeth as he pinged the gun deck and was thankfully rewarded by a prompt reply. “This is Captain Middleton,” he said after raising the Chief Gunner, “fire at will, Chief. If it moves, hit it—don’t hold anything back.”

  “Will do, sir,” the chief replied hungrily, and the Pride’s weaponry unloaded with all the fury her power plants could generate. Their newest weapons, the fifteen Artemis medium lasers which had been installed on the ship’s broadsides, lashed out at nearby Corvettes while the forward heavy lasers waited for Toto to put the bow back onto the Vae Victus.

  The bow slewed this way and that under his less-than-expert hand, but Toto managed to sweep it across the Vae Victus’ remaining hull and the Chief Gunner did his shipmates proud as he scored ten direct hits against the enemy warship’s shields.

  Amazingly, the port section of the Vae Victus’ shields had held against the peripheral blast released by the Nova warhead in the Liberator torpedo.

  “The Vae Victus’s engines are still operational,” Hephaestion reported. “She is maintaining course and speed opposite our own, and the Corvettes are moving to a defensive posture around her.”

  “Keep our bow on that battleship, Helm,” Middleton ordered through gritted teeth, “cut power to the engines if you have to and use maneuvering thrusters; we’ll drift out of the system on this trajectory anyway.”

  “Yes Captain,” Toto acknowledged.

  Middleton looked up at the Droid swarm, which was on the opposite side of the system’s orbital plane from the Pride’s projected course. As he watched, the first of the Rim Fleet warships fell to within range of the Conformity Motherships’ spinal-mounted, antimatter-fueled lasers, and a trio of blasts lashed out from the three dodecahedron-shaped ships. The awesome power of their combined shots instantly transformed the Corvette into a glowing cloud of quickly expanding debris as its pitiful shields were smashed by the hammering force of the droid super weapons.

  Another trio of impacts shook the Pride and the Damage Control stander yelled, “Major decompression on decks four through seven, port side.”

  “Get the bow around, Toto,” Middleton growled as he moved unsteadily from the Tactical station to the Damage Control station, where there was now only one crewman instead of the two from a few minutes earlier.

  The uplift roared something unintelligible, in what was clearly frustration, but the Pride’s bow slowly began to come about as he disengaged the engines and slowly spun the ship end-over-end using the maneuvering thrusters.

  Their broadside weaponry fired as fast as their cycle times would permit, which was nearly twice as often as the Pride’s heavy laser arsenal. Those cycle times were the primary reason Middleton had requested the Artemis medium lasers instead of equivalent wattage in heavy lasers, since he had suspected he would encounter droid gunboats once again.

  Never had he actually entertained the idea that he would have willingly drawn the droids into a battle for all the marbles, however, but as his ship drifted closer to the droid formation he was increasingly grateful he had opted for the lighter, faster-firing weapons.

  “Captain,” Hephaestion called out, “a Light Cruiser has broken aw
ay from the main force and its Corvettes are falling back around the Vae Victus. The cruiser is on an intercept course with us, sir; if we do not re-engage the engines they will achieve intercept in eighteen minutes.”

  Middleton switched on his wrist-mounted com-link and hailed his XO. “Sarkozy, a cruiser is moving to intercept us,” he said, fighting against the increasing pain in his broken jaw and only realizing he had used her now-defunct name instead of her new one, McKnight. “Intercept in eighteen minutes.”

  “We’re on it, Captain,” Lieutenant McKnight acknowledged. “Should I have Kratos lead his team onto the hull?”

  “Negative,” he snapped, “proceed with the mission as planned, Lieutenant. Middleton out.”

  The ship shook again, but this time it was considerably more subdued and a glance at the tactical overlay showed that Toto had succeeded in reorienting their bow to the enemy. The forward facing was the only part of the ship still shielded, and after a moment of confusion he looked at the Shields station and saw that the rating assigned there was no longer present.

  “Chief,” Middleton said into his com-link after switching to the Engineering channel, “shut down the grav-plate reinforcements on the bow.” He stopped to spit up a thick, bright gob of blood onto the deck before continuing, “Get teams up there to work on the grid; if those shields go down, we’re done.”

  “Got it, Cap,” Garibaldi acknowledged, “there’s not much to do back here anyway, what with the engines down. We’ll be affecting repairs in two minutes.”

  “We may not have two minutes,” Middleton snapped before severing the link and looking over the Shields station. The forward grid had very nearly collapsed, and he was reading a cascade failure along the port portion of the auxiliary grid. Working fast, he managed to reroute the load through the starboard grid—a workaround which would last, at most, the two minutes Chief Garibaldi had given as his peoples’ timetable.

  He ran a quick diagnostic of the port and starboard shields, finding that the starboard shields were completely shot while the port shields just might have a little life left in them.

  The micro-fusion generators, which he had used to deceive Captain Raubach several weeks earlier by piping their output directly into backup the shield generators, were still in place and he flipped the switches for four of them. To his relief, the port shield grid sputtered before charging back up. The facing was only at 24%, in all actuality, and they were heavily spotting but it was better than nothing.

  No sooner had he put those shields up than a pair of turbo-laser strikes hammered into the port shielding, shutting the entire port facing down. Knowing that three of the four micro-fusion generators had almost certainly kicked out and would require manual restart, he redirected what little power was still coming from the lone still-active generator on the port side toward the forward shields. Those shields—easily the Pride’s toughest facing—were reading 27% with heavy spotting.

  The Vae Victus lashed out with her weaponry, but since she was quite literally no more than half the ship she had been at the battle’s outset, the Pride’s forward shields absorbed the lone strike of three which was sent Middleton’s way.

  “Come on, old girl,” Middleton muttered, “hold together.”

  The Droid Fleet was moving with single-minded purpose toward the Rim Fleet, having apparently concluded that the Pride was unworthy of attention at this phase in the game. And with the state of his primary systems—to say nothing of the atmosphere streaming from his ship’s hull—Middleton was in no position to denounce that particular assessment.

  The Pride’s forward heavy laser battery—of which only seven weapons remained functional—spat fire at the Vae Victus, but only three of the strikes landed against the enemy’s shields. At this point, Middleton was just trying to wear the Commodore’s Flagship down so the droids could finish it off; the Pride, even if she somehow managed to survive, would soon be quite literally out of the fight as her inertia had already carried her very nearly out of all but the Rim Fleet’s heavily-modified turbo-lasers. The Droids, even if they were inclined to pursue, were no longer in range of any of their weaponry.

  And that meant that Middleton and his crew only needed to keep the ship together for another nine minutes, and there wouldn’t be a weapon in the system capable of reaching them.

  The Engineering team Garibaldi had assured Middleton would see to the forward shield grid made good on that promise, fighting tooth and nail to install backup power lines and somehow managing to keep the forward shields from collapsing until the Droids closed to firing range with the peripheral ships in the Rim Fleet formation. All but three of the Pride’s heavy lasers were blasted away from her battered bow in the ensuing focused barrage put on them by seemingly every ship in range, but Middleton was eternally grateful to his old friend’s efforts.

  He sighed after ten seconds had elapsed since the last turbo-laser strike on their hull, but as he did so he stupidly opened his mouth. If he had thought the pain he felt a few minutes earlier was bad, this wave sent him to his knees as the world went dark all around him and he was overcome with vertigo, briefly losing his sense of orientation. He shook his head vigorously as soon as he was able to do so, and found that he had unexpectedly vomited on the deck in a bout of semi-conscious nausea.

  Wiping his mouth on the back of his sleeve, he activated his wrist-mounted com-link. “This is the Captain,” he said through once-again gritted teeth as he steadied himself with his free hand and checked the tactical overlay, seeing that the Light Cruiser he had informed McKnight of was closing to grips with them, “prepare to receive boarders. All hands: report to your lockdown positions; repeat…”

  The world spun into darkness, and this time he lost consciousness completely.

  Chapter XVII: Pass Protection 101

  “You heard the Captain,” Sergeant Gnuko bellowed, his voice echoing throughout Main Engineering after it was clear that Captain Middleton would not complete his confirmation of the lockdown orders, “we’ve got six minutes before those blighters set foot on this ship. Now is not the time for heroics,” he said, giving a dire look to a nearby pair of ratings who were gathering up makeshift weapons, including a plasma torch and a portable abrasive saw that could easily rip through duralloy, given enough time. “Report to your lockdown stations on the double,” he said, taking a menacing step toward the pair, his power-armored legs clanging against the deck as he did so, “move!”

  The pair obliged after his third step, scurrying toward the main doors like the rest of the engineers who had remained behind when Chief Garibaldi had led the bulk of his people to the bow.

  Gnuko visually scanned Main Engineering before manually initiating the shutdown sequence on the Pride’s fusion plant. The process took him only two minutes to complete, since they had already been primed for the procedure by the engineers several minutes earlier.

  It was risky, shutting down the fusion plant, but he knew that the enemy boarders would plan to scuttle the ship after they had taken whatever it was they had come for—and Gnuko, like his Captain, had a fairly good idea what their objectives might be.

  After the plant was shut down completely, the ship’s lights switched from their usual luminosity to a lower setting, indicating that the ship was now on emergency power. Since they had taken the Liberator torpedo early in the Pride’s first deployment, life support functions had been placed on their own separate power grids, so Gnuko knew that he had roughly thirty hours to purge the ship of unwanted visitors. If it took him longer than that, his shipmates would start dying…and that was simply unacceptable to his mind.

  Clomping his way out of Main Engineering, he felt the ship shudder, presumably from the incoming cruiser’s fire. Shutting down the plant had been part of Captain Middleton’s plan to lure the boarders onto the Pride, but it seemed the enemy commander was playing it safe as his guns slammed into the port side again.

  “Defense Team squads,” he barked into the Defense Team channel as he rounde
d the corridor and made his way to the rapid response team’s location near the center of the ship, “sound off!”

  “Right Guard Team, in position,” reported a grizzled Caprian Marine named Stewart, who had stubbornly refused a proper induction into the MSP’s Lancer contingent, maintaining that he had lived as a Marine and he would die as a Marine.

  “Right Tackle Team, in position,” an old friend of Gnuko’s, named Britt, came next.

  “Center Team, ready to rock,” the brash, but impressive young Promethean named Jean-Pierre sounded off.

  “Left Guard Team, prepared to die for the Citadel,” reported the lone Tracto-an assigned to the Defense Team. His name was Paulus, and he was the brother of Peleus, who had died in the hyper dish junction so many months earlier when droids had boarded the ship. He had proven to be every bit his brother’s equal in terms of value, so Gnuko had given him command over one of the five teams—each composed of six Lancers, save the one commanded by their lone, stubborn Marine—assigned to defend the Pride of Prometheus’ most vital sections from the boarding party that would soon be with them.

  “The only dying being done in these corridors will be by the enemy, Paulus,” Gnuko quipped, knowing it was false but also knowing it was the kind of thing men said to one another on the cusp of battle. The words may have been false, but the message they conveyed was critical to any defensive unit’s success in the heat of battle. He arrived at his rapid response team’s location and added, “Left Tackle Team, locked and loaded.”

  No sooner had he spoken than an alarm in his HUD went off, indicating that foreign material had contacted the hull near one of the Pride’s two primary airlocks.

  He switched his com-link to a local channel piped into the shuttle hangar and said, “That’d be your cue, XO. Good hunting.”

  “We’ll scrape a few of them off with the Deathbacker’s cannon en route,” she promised, “wouldn’t want you Lancers thinking you can claim all the glory.”